Evaluating Coding Agents: Mind the Retrieval Conflicts
dipankarsarkar · x · 2026-07-09
A post points out that when evaluating coding agents using massive codebases, people often test reasoning skills. However, in multi-million-line repositories, the real challenge is frequently conflicts between code versions. An agent might retrieve both old and new function versions and confidently generate patches based on one, and existing harnesses might not even expose this conflict.
The author questions whether evaluations have started covering the "retrieval conflict" dimension, or if they are still solely focused on pass@1.
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